Intuitions in Africa: personal and political knowledge in the Constant Gardener.(Critical essay)

There are two kinds of knowledge possessed by characters in The Constant Gardener (Fernando Meirelles, 2005) (1). The film explores intuitions that we can call personal, generally understandings about what others are doing or feeling, or could be made to do or feel, and knowledge that is political, moving from suspicions to proofs, that is concerned with systemic conspiracies rather than individual acts. This latter kind is the knowledge that changes hands, possessed first by the principal woman in the story and later by the principal man, in a film that divides clearly into two parts, as I shall argue. I want to consider what this kind of knowledge can do and what it cannot do. I also want to explore how the two kinds of knowledge jostle for position and how one replaces the other.

 
"So you are going out there. Famous. Interesting, too." 
--Joseph Conrad, 'Heart of Darkness', 1902 

New Lives: Wives in Kenya

I want to begin by addressing another kind of knowledge, which is our awareness of the background of this narrative and setting. In taking glamorous stars and locating them in Africa, the film is doing something that is familiar through its cinematic antecedents. We shall understand its positions better if we see how it both conforms to earlier versions of the subject and how it departs from them. In this spirit I will invoke two films as points of reference, both of which involve a couple arriving in Kenya for the first time. They are linked to The Constant Gardener, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, by all three being winners of prizes, including Academy Awards. One of the films is still quite well-known: Out of Africa (Sydney Pollack, 1985), starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, its continuing currency no doubt helped by the fact that one of its major sources is a distinguished and still-read memoir, Isak Dinesen's book of the same name (2). The other is the product of a different national cinema, that of Germany: Nirgendwo in Afrika / Nowhere in Africa (Caroline Link, 2001), starring Juliane Kohler, set in the Kenya of the late nineteen thirties and forties and based on an autobiographical novel by Stefanie Zweig, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2003.

In each case a central figure--we might say, the figure who makes this film's plot happen, without whom there would be no story to tell--is a young woman, emerging from a high middle-class European background. The films begin with some preliminary matters in Europe which result in the woman's journey to Kenya. Karen Blixen / Meryl Streep is leaving behind the sexually and socially complex situation that is the result of her formative years in Denmark. Jettel Redlich / Juliane Kohler, a member of a rich Jewish family, is fleeing the increasing ferocity of Nazi persecution in pre-war Europe, and in The Constant Gardener Tessa /Rachel Weisz, an English heiress with an Italian background, is falling for the idea of turning a love affair with a minor diplomat into a new life in Africa. In each case the matter of marriage is a part of the beginning of the story, and none of the women are presented as sexual ingenues. Karen arrives in Kenya to initiate her new life by marrying Baron Bror Blixen / Klaus Maria Brandauer, Jettel is rejoining her husband, and Tessa seems to be happy to make her going to Africa and her marriage to Justin Quayle / Ralph Fiennes indistinguishable parts of a whole. In a scene towards the beginning of the film we see her arrive at Justin's office to ask him to take her to Africa and in effect to propose marriage to him, as if they are not issues she wishes to separate.

In all three cases the films dramatise the reaction of a strong-willed, sexually attractive woman to the Kenyan world, and the reaction of men to such a woman. So it is not surprising that the narratives are all in various degrees concerned with adultery, and the possibilities of fulfilment or self-abasement that it can be used to express. This is most positive in Out of Africa, in which the relation of Karen to white hunter Denys Finch Hatton/Robert Redford is at the centre of the story. In Nirgendwo in Afrika it remains a presence, both enacted in Jettel's affair with a British soldier, and repressed with some difficulty in her relation to Susskind/Matthias Habich, a figure somewhat like Denys. While the matter of adultery figures differently in The Constant Gardener, it is no less important. I shall be going on to argue that suspicions of adultery, fantasies of it, the desire for it, and failed denials of it, haunt the central figures in the first half of the film and ideal of the faithful woman, which becomes defined as the woman about whom everything is known, is important to the second half.

Finally there is the matter of children. All three films raise the question of either the loss or postponement of the woman's ability to have children. Karen is unable to bear children as a result of disease, the syphilis she contracts from Blixen. Her interest in establishing a school for the children of her African workers is an explicit substitute for the children that she cannot have. Jettel appears to be the exception, as she brings a single daughter to Africa, but when towards that film's conclusion she conceives another child it is treated as a cue to the family's return to Germany--no child is born in Africa to either woman. This would perhaps be insignificant except for the imagery of a populous black Africa which connects the films, and particularly images of numbers of black children, such as those who sometimes surround the mostly solitary white figure of Jettel's daughter. The numerousness of black children seems to comment on the rareness of white ones. In The Constant Gardener Tessa is more than once surrounded by black children and shown in relation to them. She is pregnant in the film's early scenes, but her child, for no reason that is given in the narrative, is ...